Sunday, May 6, 2018

Before Barack Obama appeared on the scene American Jews
worshipped at the altar of Franklin Roosevelt. They accepted him as their Messiah and believed that he showed the path to secular salvation.

When Hitler grew stronger in Europe, while the persecution
and genocide of Jews proceeded apace, FDR did his best to ensure that European
Jews could not resettle in the United States. While Japan was trying to find a
way to resettle European Jews within the its empire, FDR was refusing to allow
the St. Louis, filled with nearly a thousand Jewish refugees, to dock in
America.

The Roosevelt record was abysmal, to say the least. FDR’s
apologists have happily shifted the blame to Republicans, and have declared
that, given the political calculus, FDR could have done no other. One might
note that the silence coming from the White House must surely have influenced
public opinion and that a great communicator like FDR could have at least tried
to rally the nation to help save European Jews. He did not. As a moral leader, he failed miserably.

Now, thanks to an excerpt from a new book by Steven Usdin, we
have a clearer idea of the answer. We know that Roosevelt was not just motivated by political expediency. His actions reflected his attitude-- which was racist and anti-Semitic.

Usdin raises the important question:

What
explains FDR’s apparent indifference to the plight of the Jews? If he’d had
complete freedom to act without concern for the political consequences, what
would he have done?

At a time when Jews were systematically being persecuted,
FDR was concerned about post-war resettlement. His personal files and his
correspondence expose the truth:

They
make it clear that the question of where to settle the Jews had been on FDR’s
mind for years. While he was uncertain about whether they would be better off
on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one
place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.

Considering that the Wannsee Conference, which detailed the “final
solution” to the Jewish problem occurred in January, 1942, FDR’s concern for
migration seems to be slightly off kilter. Consider the “M Project” which FDR
kicked off in the summer of 1942:

Among
the files in Roosevelt’s safe were documents about the origins and goals of the
“M Project,” a secret study he commissioned of options for post-war migration
(hence “M”) of the millions of Europeans, especially Jews, expected to be displaced
by the war. The President first discussed the project in the summer of 1942
with John Franklin Carter, a journalist, novelist, and former diplomat who ran
an informal secret intelligence service for Roosevelt. Carter’s No. 2 was an
anthropologist named Henry Field.

The people FDR chose to lead the project were clearly
racists:

Roosevelt’s
first choice to head the M Project was Aleš Hrdlička, curator of physical
anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History….

A
prominent public intellectual who had dominated American physical anthropology
for decades, Hrdlička was convinced of the superiority of the white race and
obsessed with racial identity. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack he’d
written to Roosevelt expressing the view that the “less developed skulls” of
Japanese were proof that they were innately warlike and had a lower level of
evolutionary development than other races. The president wrote back asking
whether the “Japanese problem” could be solved through mass interbreeding….

Outlining
the president’s charge for the committee, Carter told Hrdlička it was expected
to “formulate agreed opinions as to problems arising out of racial admixtures
and to consider the scientific principles involved in the process of
miscegenation as contrasted with the opposing policies of so-called
‘racialism.’ ” The instructions were consistent with views Roosevelt had
expressed for decades.

Roosevelt wanted to disperse Jewish refugees around the
world. He wanted above all else that they not be allowed to congregate in any
single locate.

Roosevelt’s
goals for the committee were consistent with the views he had expressed in
1925. He wanted it to identify “the vacant places of the earth suitable for
post-war settlement” and the “type of people who could live in those places.”
Initial work was to focus on South America and Central Africa. Roosevelt wanted
the committee to explore questions such as the probable outcomes from mixing
people from various parts of Europe with the South American “base stock.”…

Roosevelt
“also pointed out,” Carter informed Hrdlička, “that while most South
American countries would be glad to admit Jewish immigration, it was on the
condition that the Jewish group were not localized in the cities, they want no
‘Jewish colonies,’ ‘Italian colonies,’ etc.” Keeping with this theme, the
president also tasked the committee with determining how to “resettle the Jews
on the land and keep them there.”

The topic had been on Roosevelt’s mind since 1938.

Bowman
understood what Roosevelt was trying to achieve through the M Project. Years
earlier, in November 1938, he had undertaken research for FDR about the
prospects for European settlement in South America. Requesting the research,
Roosevelt wrote to Bowman: “Frankly, what I am rather looking for is the
possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to
which Jewish colonies might be sent.” Roosevelt added that “such colonies need
not be large but, in all probability, should be large enough for mutual
cooperation and assistance—say fifty to one hundred thousand people in a given
area.”

The Holocaust was proceeding apace and FDR was telling
Winston Churchill about his plans for resettling the Jews:

Settlement
contingencies for a wide range of peoples were studied, but when Roosevelt
described the M Project to Churchill during a lunch at the White House in May 1943,
he focused on one particular group. FDR described it as a study about “the
problem of working out the best way to settle the Jewish question,” Vice
President Henry Wallace, who attended the meeting, recorded in his diary. The
solution, which the President endorsed, “essentially is to spread the Jews thin
all over the world,” rather than allow them to congregate anywhere in large
numbers.

It is all beyond horrifying. But, it shows clearly that a
president revered in the Jewish community was a stone-cold anti-Semite. FDR's lack of concern for the Jews who were being persecuted and annihilated in
Europe—the dog that didn’t bark—is beyond deplorable. He is talking as though it is not happening, and as though the real problem was not the millions who were being killed, but the survivors. Had FDR been a Republican, his statues would have long since been pulled down and destroyed.

I'll go one better. Under FDR, the U.S. was selling military ammunition to the Nazis. A U.S. company was left holding quite a stock of the ammunition when war broke out and quietly sold it off in the 70s. I still have a cartridge in my collection.